Third of patients never take medicine for a long-term condition, say researchers

As many as one in three patients with a long-term health condition never initiate a newly prescribed medication, data presented at the International Pharmaceutical Federation Congress on 4 September 2018 show.

The e-prescribing data showed that 20–30% of all patients, and around 30% of those with hypertension, hyperlipiademia and/or diabetes, never initiate their new prescription, said Bernard Vrijens, chief executive officer of AARDEX Group and invited professor of biostatistics at The University of Liége, Belgium.

Vrijens said that medicines adherence can be broken down into three phases: initiation, implementation and persistence. The second stage is the trickiest to address, with 15% of patients not implementing a treatment plan as prescribed. This can lead to treatment failure and potentially disease progression, and/or an acute event requiring more complex treatments.

Vrijens said the solution was using prescription and refill databases in combination with electronic monitoring to measure and monitor adherence: “It’s management, not forcing people to swallow pills.”

As more effective therapies with narrow therapeutic indices continue to be developed, medication adherence will become ever more important, emphasised Vrijens: “We cannot do precision medicine without addressing medication adherence.”